Two-Tier Pragmatist Representationalism

In Pragmatist Semantics, Zalabardo argues that sentences can be used to represent the world even when they have pragmatist meaning grounds (that is, even when we give pragmatist, use-based answers to metasemantic questions about what makes those sentences mean what they do). In this paper, I discuss the conditions for representationality to which Zalabardo resorts to assess the representational nature of speech with pragmatist meaning grounds. I suggest that these conditions only manage to capture a thin notion of representation, which would count as representational, for instance, relativistic speech about personal taste. I conclude by suggesting that Zalabardo’s thesis can be vindicated if we adopt a form of global pragmatism.